Aspect Partners with Lithium

Aspect Software, a provider of customer contact and enterprise workforce optimization, launched Aspect Social, a cloud-based offering that aligns interactions organizations have with customers on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and online communities with their overall customer contact operations. 

Through a partnership with Lithium Technologies, Aspect's new offering combines the strengths of its customer contact and workforce optimization platform with the Lithium Social Web product that Lithium gained through its recent acquisition of Social Dynamx.

Companies can move beyond passive social channel monitoring and delivering ad-hoc responses to empowering contact center agents to expertly act in a disciplined, timely way on inquiries or comments in the social sphere or even proactively engage customers in anticipation of disruptive events, such as power outages or travel delays.   

With Aspect Social, contact centers can automatically identify, prioritize, and route targeted customer service-related social media to the right contact center agents and measure the effectiveness of their responses. It provides tools and capabilities specific to the needs of contact center agents and supervisors, including the following: 

• Role-based user interface - Includes specific features and access levels for agents, supervisors and managers, .
• Automated prioritization and matching - Patented algorithms score posts for sentiment, relevancy and action-ability. Posts are then matched and auto assigned to the most appropriate agent based on history and skill.
• Advanced conversation management - Agents can follow a conversation thread rather than reacting to every post isolated from its context.
• SLA-based metrics - Agents can establish and tack against social service level agreements (SLAs), such as customer satisfaction, handle times, and resolution rates so managers and supervisors have insight into KPIs.
• Proactive social engagement - Agents can proactively inform social consumers of changes, outages or common solutions.
• CRM integration - Integration with CRM systems, knowledge bases and communities gives a more comprehensive view into the customer and provides agents with tools to provide faster and smarter responses.

"Most companies today simply monitor social media conversations on marketing campaigns or promotions on the social Web, sometimes responding to them, but more often ignoring them. However, as customers increasingly turn to social networks for customer service response and interaction, organizations need to embrace social media as a vital, two-way channel that can amplify their ability to deliver a differentiated customer experience," says Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer at Aspect, in a statement. "By aligning social customer care with the metrics and processes proven to work in the contact center infrastructure, Aspect Social enables organizations to turn social monologues into productive dialogues that grow customer loyalty."

"Enduring customer relationships are built across multiple channels and brands need to implement a sustainable and scalable social strategy," said Mike Betzer, senior vice president of Lithium Social Web, in a statement. "The Aspect relationship gives us a contact center provider as passionate as us about improving the customer experience and increasing customer engagement to drive measurable business results. Aspect shares our vision of seamless social customer experience and is an excellent partner with a proven ability to combine best-in-class technologies to deliver rich customer care solutions."

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